Cartea lui E. Thomas Ewing,
Teachers of Stalinism,Policy, Practice, and Power
in Soviet Schools of the 1930s (P. Lang, 2002) este o carte
fundamentală pentru cititorii interesaţi de istoria regimului şi
societăţii sovietice în anii 1930, nu doar pentru cei interesaţi de
istoria educaţiei sovietice.
Autorul cărţii face o analiză
echilibrată şi impresionant documentată (cu surse de arhivă, presă
periodică şi interviurile aşa-numitului Proiect de la Harvard din
anii 1950) a evoluţiei populaţiei şi statutului învăţătorilor din
şcolile primare şi secundare din URSS într-o perioadă fondatoare a
regimului sovietic (cea care începe cu „revoluţia culturală” din
primul cincinal (1928-1932/33) şi se încheie cu 1940). Ewing ne
spune, în fond, că provocările cu care s-a confruntat statul
sovietic în punerea în aplicare a învăţămîntului primar universal
obligatoriu (decretat în 1930) au fost asemănătoare cu cele ale
statelor occidentale în secolul 19- înc. sec. 20, doar că în cazul
URSS acest proces a fost unul mult mai dur şi resimţit mai dureros
de către populaţia civilă întrucît şcolarizarea de masă s-a
desfăşurat aici în termeni de urgenţă, cu eforturi, dar şi cu forţe
de coerciţie extraordinare asupra învăţătorilor şi a populaţiei
civile (mai ales a celei rurale, cea mai reticentă la şcolarizare
şi la modernizare - în formulă sovietică). Asemeni colectivizării
şi industrializării forţate (desfăşurate în acelaşi timp),
răspîndirea învăţămîntului de masă s-a defăşurat ca un proiect
„ultra-modernist” („high modernist” – J. C. Scott), planificat de
către statul sovietic, în general neglijînd insuficienţa
resurselor, a infrastructurii şi a personalului
şcolar.
Învăţătorii aveau un statut
dublu vulnerabil: faţă de populaţia locală, care îşi manifesta
deseori ostilitatea faţă de ei (fiind văzuţi, nu fără dreptate,
drept agenţi ai puterii sovietice), pe de altă parte faţă de
oficialii locali, care nu rareori le subminau autoritatea
(învăţătorii erau cel mai adesea tineri şi femei, ceea ce le
accentua vulnerabilitatea). Totuşi, aşa cum demonstrează Ewing,
învăţătorul şi-a asumat, de voie sau nevoie, un rol de mediator
între reprezentanţii puterii şi comunităţile locale, încercînd să
uzeze de competenţe de comunicare şi strategii de acomodare în
ambele sensuri pentru a remedia o relaţie altminteri foarte
dificilă între puterea sovietică şi populaţia civilă, în contextul
foarte tensionat al primului cincinal şi în anii care i-au urmat.
Este interesant, de asemenea, că spre mijlocul şi sfîrşitul anilor
1930, populaţia rurală din URSS a recunoscut tot mai mult
instituţia şcolară, împreună cu rolul învăţătorului în sînul
comunităţii lor. Aceasta o face pe Sh. Fitzpatrick să afirme că
şcolarizarea de masă a devenit unul din proiectele sovietice cele
mai populare, în ciuda rezistenţei pe care acest proiect o
stîrneşte la început, pe parcursul primului cincinal, în sînul
populaţiei rurale.
Capitole importante din carte se
referă la modul în care a evoluat conţinutul şi metodologia
activităţii didactice. După un avînt revoluţionar din anii 1920, în
care s-a încercat abolirea relaţiei de putere dintre învăţător şi
elev, oficialii Ministerului învăţămîntului (Narkompros) din URSS
restabilesc, odată cu începutul anilor 1930, relaţia de autoritate
tradiţională din cadrul activităţii şcolare, conţinutul şi
structura curriculumului şcolar şi totodată manifestă o preocupare
crescîndă pentru respectarea disciplinei în
şcoli.
În cele din urmă, şcoala
sovietică din perioda sovietică tîrzie nu s-a schimbat foarte mult
faţă de cea de la sfîrşitul
anilor 1930 . Tensiunile şi conflictele din sînul
şcolii sovietice au diminuat însă foarte tare în perioadele care au
urmat celui de al doilea război mondial. Din acel moment putem
vorbi de o consolidare a ceea ce P. Bourdieu a numit „autoritatea
pedagogică” a statului (sovietic) vizavi de comunităţile locale.
Iată cîteva citate din
carte:
In 1931, the
Communist Party Central Committee repudiated a decade of
experimentation by calling for a return to classroom-based
instruction with a standardized curriculum, stable textbooks,
regular examinations, and competitive grading. (...) Whether
teachers chose this approach because of proven effectiveness or
because of the limits of their training, they contributed, however
inadvertently to the consolidation of structures and relations
necessary for maintaining this dictatorship.
(8)
Lenin called on
all teachers to work "for the victory of socialism". Lenin's
successor, Stalin, declared that education was "a weapon," and then
added: "the force of which depends on who possesses it and against
whom it is to be struck." (8)
Defining schools
as "weapons" made teachers into both the instruments and the
victims of repressive power. (8)
The number of
teachers directlyaffected by state repression was always a
small proportion of the overall profession. Yet state
repression had far more profound indirect effects by heightening a
sense of vulnerability, compounding the stultifying effects of
censorship and propaganda, and, more, importantly, coercing
teachers into believing that their best hope for self-protection
would be found in enforcing the new authoritarianism.
(9)
As teachers
recognized, often white painfully, their location between the
"outside" world and the peasant community [in late Tsarist Russia],
their vulnerability to the arbitrary authority of state and church
officials, their economically impoverished and culturally deprived
status, and, for women teachers, their subordinate position in the
patriarchal village were real obstacles to acquiring authority of
state among the peasant masses. (19)
By the late 1920s,
teachers were thus left with an ambiguous legacy, in which the
activism of visible minority, which had been initially suppressed
[after 1905 Revolution] but now was encouraged by government
authorities, was accompanied by broader patterns of conformity,
dependency, and vulnerability. (19)
Like the incident
involving teacher Antonov, but in far more violent terms, the
attempted murder of Sokolova illustrated the vulnerability of rural
teachers on the school front. The brutality of this attack was
consistent with brutality of life in Soviet villages, as the state
unleashed a virtual war upon the peasantry, beginning with
escalating repression of kulaks, intensifying with grain
procurements and collectivization campaigns, and culminating in
draconian measures to control food supplies at a time of widespread
famine. (21)
(...) teachers’
vulnerability to both opponents and agents of Soviet power.
(27)
The sexual
harassment of women teachers was thus part of a broader pattern of
suspicion, resistance, and outright hostility toward women who
exceeded traditionally defined gender boundaries within the peasant
community. (34)
Many teachers were
accused of refusing to take sides in the bitter struggle between
Soviet regime and its opponents. (45)
Western historians have
recognised the difficult position of rural teachers between state
and society, vulnerable to both anti-Soviet peasants and the agents
od Spviet power: Lynne Viola suggests that "most teachers were
apolitical and simply attempted to do the best they could under
difficult circumstances"; Holmes concludes that "teachers were
victimized by the public as well as by local officials" and were
both participants and victims of a brutalization of life" during
collectivisation; Fitzpatrick agues that rural teachers lived "a
difficult and precarious life" in their "ambiguous position between
Spviet power and a resentful peasantry"; and Johnson refers to "the
increasingly desperate position" of rural teachers. (...) In
addition to recognising this vulnerability, this study also calls
attention to teachers' purposeful actions within the constraints of
their positions. While the Soviet term of "neutrality" implied
passive refusal to take part in a conflict with only two possible
sides, the concept of "mediator" is a more useful way to understand
the active engagement of knowledgeable actors as the conjuncture of
multiple structures of opportunity and constraint.
(48)
The duality inherent in
teaches' role also suggests that gender shaped identities. While
this study presents numerous examples of women teachers harassed
and abused by male peasants and officials, it is also important to
recognize how teachers' identities were gendered, that is,
constructed in ways that correspond to, reaffirmed, and thus were
strengthened by culturally defined differences between men and
women. By acting as mediators in ways that allowed for meaningful
engagement even within the constraints of their multiple
vulnerabilities, Soviet teachers behaved in a manner culturally
defined as "feminine." (49)
(...) universal education
offered teachers a more proactive role, and thus a more secure
position, in the "revolution from above". By assuming a central
role in the most effective and popular campaign of the First Year
Plan, teachers participated actively in the Stalinist
transformation of Soviet society (55).
According to a
contemporary, Lenin firmly believed that "public education meant
revolution and revolution - public education."
(56)
Each step
toward universal education made the state into a more intrusive
presence and pervasive force by bringing people into direct
contact, and even confrontation, with the agents of Soviet power.
The counting of school-age children, the first step toward
universal enrollment, illustrated the political dimension of this
campaign. While ostensibly intended to determine the number
eligible for schooling, the call to "expose" such children
connected this campaign to broader efforts to classify and control
individuals. (61)
In rural
regions, Soviet officials demanded that all homes confiscated from
kulaks, priests, and noblemen be converted to schools.
(61)
While
demanding "liquidation of kulaks as class" in political and
economic terms, therefore, the Central Committee seemed to
recognize mass education as a way to reintegrate children of "class
aliens" into the dominant system. (63)
While
resistance to schooling never attained the level of peasant
opposition to collectivization, the fact that mass education was
often greeted with doubts, suspicion, and even hostility provided
important insights into developing relationship between state and
society in the early Stalinist era. (64)
Resistance to
mass education thus revealed broader conflicts between indigenous
traditions and centralized power. (64)
The most
emphatic statements of resistance, however, revealed deep fears
about authority within families and communities. (...)
(65)
The universal
education campaign occurred during dekulakization and
collectivization, which provoked the most widespread, sustained,
and significant resistance to state power in the entire Soviet
period. Resistance to mass schooling was undoubtedly reinforced by
broader fears about state efforts to destroy community values,
elites, and relationships. (66)
Parents and
children came to accept Soviet schools because they promised some
improvement in the lives of individuals and communities. This
process of building support for mass education did not happen
automatically, but depended upon ability of teachers to serve as
mediators between the values of the community and the structures of
the Soviet system. (66)
The expansion
of secondary education did not encounter, or provoke, the same
conflicts and disruptions as did the campaign for universal
elementary education. Whereas elementary school expansion
threatened to disrupt broader relations between state and community
by enrolling all children in established schools, in many cases
fort the first time, the process of encouraging and even compelling
pupils who were completing the fourth-grade to continue to the next
level did not pose the same challenge to established elites and
traditional values. (72)
According to
historian Fitzpatrick, efforts to expand rural schooling in the
late 1920s met with considerable opposition from peasants
suspicious of any extension of Soviet power. Over the next decade,
however, these attitudes changed dramatically, leading Fitzpatrick
to conclude that widespread enthusiasm for education was "the rare
example from the 1930s of wholehearted adoption by most adult
peasants of a key component of Soviet ideology".
(79)
Whereas
dekulakization accentuated divisions within the peasant community
by marginalizing anc eliminating certain groups, universal
education was a far more inclusive and conciliatory process.
(80)
According to
Soviet figures, teachers earned more than collective farm
employees, about the same as urban workers, and less than engineers
or managers. (89)
Soviet
officials expected that "rejuvenation" (omolozheniia) and "renewal"
(obnovlenie) among teachers would transform schools into pillars of
the socialist system. (Nota) At the same time, these same officials
expressed concern about "tens of thousands of new people" flooding
into schools (...)" (123)
On paper,
Soviet educational policy in the 1930s actually precluded
discrimination based on social origins, as well as nationality and
gender. In practice, however, the treatment of teachers based in
social origins depended a great deal on the assumptions, agendas,
and ambitions of those in power at the local level, on the one
hand, and on a broader dynamic of uncertainty, anxiety and
intolerance characteristic of the 1930s, on the other.
(132)
Stalinist
repression depended on sets of relational, rather than absolute,
constructions. The power to determine when and how family
background mattered was just one of the ways in which a repressive
system defined and exploited personal and professional
vulnerability. (139)
During the
"cultural revolution", from 1928 through early 1931, this radical
call for total experimentation was embraced by a few teachers
(...). But radicals' inflammatory rhetoric tended to alarm and even
alienate teachers, parents, and local officials.
(154)
Subjects
central to the "polytechnical school" of the 1920s, such as
political economy, technology, and labor, were eliminated. Over the
course of the decade, therefore, the Soviet curriculum increasingly
resembled that of the prerevolutionary school, except where
communist instruction took the place of religious study.
(158)
Teachers who
“allowed” too many pupils repeatd a grade could be punished. (174)
(…) Teachers who did not have any failing pupils, by contrast,
received lavish praise and material rewards.
(174)
(…) Soviet
teachers thus came to recognize the delicate balance between what
was expected, what was possible, and what had to be made up.
(176)
[September
1935: CC decree:] „On the organization of instructional work, and
internal order in elementary, incomplete secondary, and secondary
schools.” (196)
In some
cases, teachers’ enthusiasm for establishing discipline exceeded
norms set by authorities. The Siberian teacher who promised to
campaign for „iron discipline” was criticized for misunderstanding
the meaning of „conscious discipline,” while those who demanded
that police officers be stationed in schools were accused of
abdicating their own responsibility for maintaining order.
(199)
The striking
similarity between teachers’ views and policies enacted by
political leaders suggests that the convergence of influences „from
above” and „from below” directly contributed to the construction of
authoritarian relations in the Soviet school of the 1930s.
(199)
In place of
physical punishment therefore, officials and teachers looked for
strategies that reduced the visibility of the mechanisms and agents
of control while making individual students into objects of total
surveillance [cf. Foucault] (207).
[During the
Great Purges of 1937-38] teachers were made vulnerable not only by
their family origins, but also by the actions of their family
members. (232)
The most
extreme applications of the principle of “guilt by association”
were the so-called “black lists” of teachers to be dismissed
exclusively because of their personal relations. In late 1937, the
Moscow educational department placed almost 600 teachers on such a
list. (233)
In terms of
the relative impact of the terror, however, teachers appear
to have been less victimized than other social
groups.
A former
teacher offered this striking warning: “In order to avoid every
unpleasantness and trouble with the secret police, I would advise a
young person to keep his mouth shut, not to say anything
unnecessary, to be less active and more passive.” Recalling that
colleagues “never spoke about political matters,” (…)
(247)
(...) the long-lasting influence
of Stalinist education on the development of the Soviet Union. The
young women and men who began teaching in the Stalin era became the
generation that would dominate education, and the Soviet system
more generally for the next several decades.
(276)
